QA/Testing in an eXtreme Programming Environment

Extreme Programming (XP) is an agile software methodology that puts a heavy emphasis on testing by developers. In an XP project, the role of testing changes, because tests are considered to be a form of unambiguous requirement specification and are created before code is written. Therefore, rather than being back-end validators, the test team is brought on board early in the process to become front-end specifiers. By writing acceptance tests, the test team, in effect, writes the requirements the developers must conform to. Robert Martin delivers an overview of the XP process, stressing the new role of the QA/test team.